Fishermen ask state to keep untended gillnets in check

Drop a net two fathoms high and 100 fathoms wide into the sea and you will catch a lot of fish. Leave that net to “soak” and you will waste even more than you catch.

Kaimi Rose Lum

Drop a net two fathoms high and 100 fathoms wide into the sea and you will catch a lot of fish. Leave that net to “soak” and you will waste even more than you catch.

Sink gillnets that remain untended in the ocean for sustained periods of time can trap and kill vast quantities of marine life, not just the fish the gillnetter is trying to catch but turtles, seals, dolphins and whales. Of the fish that are caught, only a portion — the freshest — are taken to market. The rest, rotted or chewed on by predators, fall out of the mesh or drop to the sea bottom when the gillnetter returns and shakes his net out.

“It’s just an incredible waste of fish,” says commercial hook-and-line fisherman Tom Scherer, of Truro, who has seen first-hand the damage that gillnets can do. A lobsterman before he became a cod fisherman, Scherer started fishing around the Cape in the mid ’80s and was “always familiar with the gillnet boats.”

“Over the years we’ve watched them fish and we’ve always wondered why they’re allowed to keep their nets out,” he says. “There’s just an incredible amount of bycatch, and that bycatch occurs more frequently when the nets are left untended.”

This week, Scherer and Provincetown fisherman Paul Tasha petitioned the state Div. of Marine Fisheries to establish a gillnet tending requirement, which would mandate that gillnetters take their nets with them back to port. A simple rule such as this, the fishermen say, would prevent the huge loss of marine life that occurs when gillnets are left out in the ocean.

“The state must enact a tending requirement for sink gillnet gear as soon as possible, thus eliminating tremendous waste and discard resulting in undocumented mortality of fish and the unreported killing of mammals, sharks, reptiles and pelagic species,” their letter to DMF director Paul Diodati states.

To enforce the tending requirement, Tasha suggests that a tagging system similar to the one used for lobster traps be set up.

The two wonder “why nothing’s been done about it before,” Scherer says. The more he and Tasha discussed the issue with other fishermen, from here to Martha’s Vineyard, the more there seemed to be a consensus about the negative effects of untended gillnets. “We learned other people saw the exact same thing and felt the exact same way.” In these days of dwindling fish stocks, “We’re all suffering,” he says. “We can’t waste such a valuable resource.”

Scherer and Tasha have collected about 10 signatures for their petition — all fishermen and conservationists from Provincetown or Truro. Their work also sparked the interest of a Vineyard selectman, Warren Doty of Chilmark, who with Chilmark’s shellfish constable sent an identical petition to the DMF last week.

“We have sent in a letter with about 10 signatures,” confirms Doty. “Our concern with gillnets has been south of Martha’s Vineyard as it affects all of our fisheries.” In the waters south of the Vineyard, valuable species like fluke are often trapped in tied-down gillnets and discarded as bycatch.

While there are no gillnetting boats out of Provincetown, fishermen on the Outer Cape share their waters with the gillnetters who come down from Hull and Green Harbor. And a significant percentage of the fishermen in the Chatham-based Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association have switched over from hook boats to gillnetting.

(CCCHFA did not return calls requesting more information about the gillnetters in their group.)

Some Cape Tip mariners say there’ve been times when they’ve seen gillnets left not just for weeks but for months off the back beach. The longer they are in the water, the higher the likelihood they will break loose in storms or get hit and set adrift by draggers and the like.

“This ‘ghost’ net is still ‘fishing’ and will continue to fish until it is removed from the water or washes up on the beach, becoming yet another piece of fishing-related pollution,” states Tasha and Scherer’s petition.

And Tasha notes that, whether fixed or drifting, the gear presents a serious hazard to marine mammals. He once cut free a dolphin tangled in a gillnet, he says.

“It’s an ugly way to die — and it’s avoidable. Let’s not have it be stupid and ugly,” he says.

Tasha points to a 2005 report analyzing the types of fishing gear involved in humpback and right whale entanglements. The report found that sink gillnet gear was found to be responsible for half of the humpback incidents and 14 percent of the right whale entanglements.

Scott Landry, director of whale rescue at PCCS, is careful to qualify those statistics by noting that the times when they’ve actually been able to identify the fishing gear have been “relatively few.”

“Yes, gillnets were implicated in 50 percent of the humpback and 14 percent of right whale entanglement cases we examined but we could not say that this was an accurate reflection of what actually happens in the wild,” Landry states.

Nonetheless, to the question of whether a gillnet tending requirement would have a positive impact on the whales, he answers, “Yes, I think so, in theory, because the main conclusion we were able to draw from our analysis is, the less rope you have in the water column for the least amount of time is of the greatest value,” from a conservation point of view.

“In theory, it seems like it would have a beneficial effect,” Landry says.

At the very least, Tasha says he hopes their petition to the DMF will open up a conversation about the gillnetting issue and “bring it to light.”

Kaimi Rose Lum can be reached at klum@provincetownbanner.com

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